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A former journalist​, ​newspaper editor, ​​and director of marketing and communications in the high-tech industry, Samuel Scott is ​now a global marketing speaker and writer of the regular ​“The Promotion Fix” column in The Drum​ in which he discusses integrated traditional and digital marketing.​

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Samuel Scott - @samueljscott

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SamuelScott

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Columnist, The Promotion Mix

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The Drum

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Tel Aviv, Israel

Favorite Thing About SEO

The community!

Favorite Topics

Advanced SEO, Content, Events, Marketing Industry, Public Relations

Blog Comments & Posts

Without a doubt, the most entertaining guide to publicity campaigns you'll ever read. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll realize this is what you've been doing (or should've been doing) all along. In today's comprehensive post, Samuel Scott outlines the tactics every marketer can and should be following to success — online, offline, or both.

It's imperative to build a brand among people over the long term rather than chase an algorithm and try to get high rankings in the short term. Many of the marketing strategies developed in the early 20th century are still applicable today. Samuel Scott delves into the reasons we should be applying traditional marketing tactics from the past today, and how we can achieve that.

Online advertising is often based around the idea of an "impression," but few of us actually know what that means. We assume it means some sort of interaction with a human being, but as it turns out, we're quite wrong. Today we dive into some staggering statistics with Samuel Scott.

All of the articles on Moz's blog are usually serious and always highly informative for our community, but for the holiday season, I was inspired by the site's Google Algorithm Change History to contribute something a little more lighthearted as a year-end summary. So, here is The Twelve Days of Google Christmas, which reviews all of the "gifts" that Google has given we marketers and webmasters in the past year (or so) as far as the important changes to the search engine's algorithm.

I just saw that you put my picture in this post. <embarrassed but proud> I just wanted to second the idea and tell everyone that if you want to grow your digital marketing career, MozCon is the best place to get noticed.

I had been a community member for a few years, and I pitched last year to speak as a community speaker on server log analysis. To my surprise and delight, I was accepted! Ever since, my career has grown in ways that are so numerous that I cannot list them all here.

Here's one: I'm writing this right now on a plane returning home to Israel after speaking at two events in South America -- that were direct results of the organizer seeing the video of my MozCon presentation. She contacted me out of the blue to come to speak. No joke!

All of this came directly or indirectly as a result of pitching and then speaking at MozCon.

So, if you want to get noticed, change jobs, get more speaking engagements, hug Roger, tell Rand that he needs to grow the mustache back, or just want to see how awesome Ronell is at emceeing events, here are a few tips.

1. Actionable. There's a time and a place for thought-leaderships talks and for best-practices discussions with the goal of doing something specific. MozCon -- or at least the Community Speakers part -- is the latter. Make it like this: "You want to do X? Here's how you do X." What can MozCon attendees take away from your talk and implement the following day at work?

2. Make your pitch short and concise. Mine was something like this: "How to do server log analysis for technical SEO. Check X for A reason. Check Y for B reason. Check Z for C reason. Here's how you fix X, Y, and Z if something is broken. Any questions?" (You can see my presentation's deck and notes as one example.)

3. Be original. Think of a topic that is rarely discussed on this blog or in the SEO and online marketing worlds. The year that I spoke, another community speaker talked about hiring best practices -- and that was a topic that is hardly ever talked about. So, be original and think of something better than "this is how you build links" or "this is how you do on-page optimization."

4. Don't worry -- you'll have help. Your pitch doesn't have to be performance-ready. Mozzers will help you with the outline, the flow, the text, the images, the design, and more long before you send them the final version. (Thanks to Erica McGillivray and Christy Correll for helping with mine!) Just have a great pitched that is fleshed out comprehensively but is also simple and concise.

5. You need to submit a video. If you don't have a video of you speaking on YouTube or something, film yourself with your phone for five minutes or so and upload that to as a private YouTube video. The important thing is not what you say here (that's what the text of the pitch is for) but how you will say it. The idea is to get an idea of your speaking style and delivery too -- for the audience's benefit.

6. Everyone will be very supportive. Can I tell you a secret? No matter how many times I speak at events, I get so nervous beforehand. I'm a nervous wreck. Even though I hope I appeared confident on stage at MozCon, I was pacing back and forth backstage for an hour beforehand. When I finished my talk, all I could see was white light -- the emcee, Zeph Snapp, asked me someone's Q&A question, and I just blanked and started babbling.

But it was OK! Beforehand and afterwards, Mozzers and everyone else at the conference were so supportive. A guest of mine was sitting in the audience, and she overheard someone say during my talk in admiration, "I don't know how people get on this stage and do that -- I never could!"

So, don't worry -- no matter how nervous you think you'll feel, it will be all good. Everyone in the audience -- all 2,000 of them or so -- will give you massive props just for having the guts to go on one of the top stages in the world. And it just gives you more practice for any future speaking talks that you may have.

Well, if anyone has any questions about the community speakers section, feel free to connect -- glad to help! But I'd suggest talking to Ronell and Moz as the best obvious resources. :)

The biggest issue with programmatic is that there is no quality control. You get ads for questionable products, fake news, and other negative things on reputable websites through no fault of their own. It's hurts their brands, and it hurts the people who click on it.

Everyone can read all about it in the context of Medium here. It's eliminating human quality control all in the names of earning a few more pennies per click.

Any time that you replace humans with machines in marketing, you're going to get terrible results. The way to avoid ad fraud is to work out ad deals with websites directly and ignore all of the fraudulent actors and machines in the middle. (Note: I wrote about ad fraud at length on Moz here.)

Mike, I cannot put into adequate words how much I absolutely love this post!

In the past, we've always divided SEO into " technical / on page" and "off page," but as Google has become smarter, I've personally always thought that the best "off page" SEO is just PR and publicity by another name. As a result, I think we're increasingly going to need to focus on all of the things that Mike has discussed here. Yes, it's technical and complicated -- but it's very important.

After all, from a business standpoint, technical SEO is the one thing that we can do that no one else can do. Most developers, system administrators, and DevOps engineers don't even know that stuff. It's our "unique product quality," so to speak.

Of course, I'm a little biased. I spoke on server log analysis at MozCon in September. For those who would like to learn more about it, here is a link to a post on my personal blog with my deck and accompanying notes on my presentation and what technical SEO things we need to examine in server logs. (My post also contains links to my company's informational material on the open source ELK Stack that Mike mentioned in this post on how people can deploy it themselves for server log analysis. I'd appreciate any feedback!)

The Sun (in the UK) has a circulation of 2.2 million. The New York Times has 1.7 million. Is The Sun more "successful"?

You can always get more and more readers -- or clicks or opens or whatever -- by going cheap through tabloid journalism or using clickbait headlines. But what is the cost of joining a race to the bottom?

I don't want the entire Internet to become BuzzFeed. Moreover, I would argue that sacrificing a little CTR in the short term leads to stronger brands over the long term because people will take you more seriously when what you publish is more serious from the very beginning -- from the time that all they see is a meta title or an e-mail subject line.

Larry, I'm going to have to disagree here. I think you're helping a tree to grow now at the expense of burning down the whole forest later.

20+ Jaw-Dropping Guerrilla Marketing Examples

This is the updated headline, which we changed just a few months ago, in the hopes of increasing the CTR. And yep, we sure did!

Before we updated the headline, the article had a CTR of 1 percent and was ranking in position 8. Nothing awesome.

Since we updated the headline, the article has had a CTR of 4.19 percent and is ranking in position 5.

So, basically, your advice is to make every headline clickbait? That's terrible. Not everything is about maximizing rankings and clicks. It's also about branding -- and clickbait makes one's brand looks cheap.

There's a certain article on my company's blog. (I didn't write or commission it -- it predates me.) It's clickbait to the extreme and ranks highly for a short-tail keyword. It brings a LOT of traffic. Guess what the conversion rate is? Something like 0.003%. It's one of the lowest-converting posts on our entire site in terms of both conversion rate and total conversions.

I have a guess as to why. When a person clicks on a clickbait headline, he also already subconsciously decided to take the resulting article and publisher less seriously. The brand is already hurt. So, it is far less likely that he will convert. Our post and guides that have "boring" and sober headlines convert a lot more because they are serious, the titles are serious, and people take them and us seriously. (We're in a dry, serious industry.) And they're ranking more highly and highly over time.

Will, thanks for the thought-provoking quiz and post. Just wanted to give some two cents. I have little data to support any of this -- it's all hypothetical conjecture on my part.

““What would we have to do to outrank that site?”

“Why is our competitor outranking us on this search?”

Those two questions are exactly the reason that I have largely disassociated myself with the "SEO" brand in recent years. I got sick and tired of people asking questions (such as those two) that were getting increasingly impossible to answer. Too many employers and clients still think -- even in 2016 -- that all one needs to do is wave a magic wand to rank first in Google.

But as we all know, that is not true. Even after we do all of the technical and on-page optimization, there are still countless other factors that go into play. And as Google invests more in AI and machine learning, Google is going to speed further and further away from people like us having any concrete idea of why one thing ranks highly over another.

My hypothesis: Google is thinking more and more like a human being, and no set of SEO metrics will be able to replicate what a human brain thinks. Brands will soon be the top "ranking factor." But how can SEO metrics quantify a brand?

Assuming this is true (and it may well not be true), how should we respond? Well, here's how I personally view things. (And it's just me.)

As Rand once tweeted here, SEO results are increasingly just by-products of doing good web development and marketing. So, I make sure that our website is 100% OK on a technical level and that on-page optimization on pages and posts targets our desired keywords.

But everything else is just good marketing and PR. We don't do "linkbuilding." We don't do "guest posting." Here is just a little of what we do:

-- Create an execute a publicity strategy that is one part getting relevant, authoritative publications and bloggers to write about us and one part contributing thoughtful by-lined articles to such outlets

-- Form corporate partnerships that result in cross-promotion

-- Sponsor and speak at conferences to raise awareness and get people talking about us online and offline

All of this is just good marketing work that one would do even if the Internet did not exist. And this real marketing work results in brand awareness, increased web searches, and inbound links as natural by-products. So, where is "SEO" today when traditional marketing seems to have always delivered the best results.

So, Will, in terms of specific pages and queries and why things rank #2 versus #3, I don't even think about it. I don't worry about the small things. As long as we do all of this marketing work, then our rankings in general and as a whole will increase over time. If the trend is "up and to the right" over the long term, I am happy. Google is too smart to make it worthwhile to think too much about the small stuff anymore.

Create a website that delights your target audience, do the technical and on-page SEO, and then build a good brand. All the rest will fall into place. (Not that it's easy.)

I think my issue is that people think about whether and how to do "content" -- when the production and distribution of marketing collateral is always a given. There is no marketing without content. If you do advertising, you need to create ads. If you do publicity, you need to create publicity collateral. If you do personal selling, you need sales collateral. If you do SEO, you need to create that informational material.

Marketers have always created "content" to execute campaigns. That's why I question when people talk about "content strategy." All marketing uses content; therefore, all marketing is "content marketing." It's a vague, useless phrase that does not mean anything specific or precise. If a word means anything, it means nothing.

No, I don't mind at all -- after all, MozCon is all about sharing ideas (even if some disagree).

Here's my point. We think about "content" first when we should be thinking about the frameworks and strategies first. All content is produced in the execution of strategies.

The first questions to ask are whether companies should focus on SEO, publicity, direct marketing, personal selling, PR, or any other marketing and communications strategies. THEN should people ask what tactical marketing collateral and content should be created and distributed over the selected channels in order to execute those strategies. But if one starts talking about "content" at the very beginning, then that is putting the cart before the horse.

Strategy first; content second. Content is a tactic, not a strategy.

If I decide to focus on advertising as a strategy, only then should I think about what ads to create specifically.

Rand, I certainly see where you're going -- and I agree with a lot of what you say.

But personally, I'd suggest looking at it from a completely different angle because "content" is not a strategy. There's no such thing as a "content strategy." Marketing collateral and content is merely created and disseminated within the overall context of a greater strategy such as SEO or sales or publicity or PR.

This WBF is talking mainly about what companies should publish on their blogs. Well, company blogs have become an important communications channels for many businesses. Therefore, companies need an overall communications and/or marcom strategy.

As I detailed in this lengthy tutorial on integrated on Moz on Back to the Future Day, I'd suggest that businesses first make a list of all of the audiences that will likely read material on the blog. This can include current customers, potential customers, current and potential investors, journalists, influencers, community members, potential future employees, competitors, and countless others.

Then, it's important to determine: What message should be communicated -- even if subtly -- to each audience? How will the message be communicated and disseminated? For potential customers, that might mean posting material that will rank highly in organic search. For journalists, you might want to seed publicity campaigns on the blog. If you want to headhunt people who work in a certain field, you might want to post material that highlights how awesome that department is and what it does.

And so on and so forth. Once one has an overall marcom strategy that aims to address all of a company's marketing and communications goals, then the next step is to plan the tactics of how the marketing collateral will be created and transmitted over the blog and elsewhere.

If a landing page is going to be used to get paid traffic (online advertising campaigns), then it should focus on conversion. After all, when people click on an ad, they know that they're going to be pushed to do something.

If a landing page is going to be used to get organic traffic (SEO campaigns), then it should focus more on traffic and great content and less on conversion -- especially when the targeted keywords are informational queries and not transactional ones.

The challenge that i have found is that most people are against payday loans and lenders so why would anyone want to link with a website of this sort?

Think of a creative, outrageous publicity stunt that will get you covered in the major news (my tutorial here on Moz might have some inspiration). Masses of people will start to talk about the company online and on social media, and many of those mentions will happen to contain links and social shares.

Most "content marketing" and "link earning" is really just "publicity" by another name: Simply get the media, bloggers, and people to talk about you online, and that will result in mentions and links as natural by-products.

I'm still in a state of shock that my pitch was accepted to Mozcon this year! While I recover and start to think about my presentation and deck, I just hope that I will do the community proud. :) If I can help some SEO to do his or her job better, I will have succeeded and that's all I ask. That's my dream.

Dirk, thank you for your comment. I also wish that we'd see more interesting and original posts on marketing blogs in general.

The problem is that we have been partially forced by Google and social networks into imitating the publish-or-perish world of academia. If we publish much less often -- even if the individual posts themselves are much higher-quality -- then we risk perhaps losing rankings and social media shares and whatnot. So we all-too-often publish just to publish.

But here's the result. My Feedly has a backlog of hundreds and hundreds of posts on many different marketing blogs that I have yet to read. And I may never will. Why? With each passing month and each passing year, I see fewer and fewer writings that have something new and original to say. I feel like I have read it all. Every blog is repeating itself.

Do I really need to read another post on how to get more Twitter followers? How to optimize a website for international SEO? How to do publicity strategy? How to structure AdWords campaigns? How to create a good presentation deck? How to use schema code?

I have bookmarked resources that are the definitive guides to all of those things in the event that I forget something. Why do I really need to read anything new?

I'm not really expecting an answer -- it's more of a rhetorical question.

Thanks to BopDesign for publishing this important post. I hope it will start a discussion that the marketing community needs to hear.

I hope people will not mind a long comment, but this is important to me. I'm a former journalist and newspaper editor who now runs the marcom of a high-tech startup. I started contributing to YouMoz a few years ago, and now I contribute to the main Moz blog once in a while. I also contribute to TechCrunch.

If people will indulge me, here's how I recommend that marketers approach the issue of "guest blogging" to get past the gatekeepers such as BopDesign and myself.

1. Ask yourself why you want to contribute an article to a publication. If it is first and foremost to get backlinks, you are a spammer. I get dozens of pitches over e-mail and LinkedIn messages every week from people who want to submit a "guest post" to my company's blog or my personal blog. And every time that people use the phrase "guest post," it ends up being 500 words of crap with a few exact-match anchor text backlinks. That person is marked as spam and ignored forever.

Contributing articles to publications has always been a PR and publicity strategy since long before the Internet even existed. (I discuss this in more detail in my lengthy publicity tutorial here on Moz.) And the same is true today. The real goal of publishing articles in publications, blogs, and news outlets is to 1.) raise awareness of yourself, your company, and your product or service and/or 2.) communicate and publicize an idea.

2. Understand the real ROI of contributing articles to publications. Publishing on other websites will rarely get you a lot of website traffic, leads, or sales directly. "Direct marketing" and "Publicity" are two of the traditional strategies within the traditional Promotion Mix. Direct marketing campaigns aim to result in direct, immediate sales and leads as a result of sending sales collateral to a list of specific people over e-mail or online ads or direct mail. Publicity campaigns aim for something different. The KPIs include increased awareness and "share of voice" and "overall sentiment" (compared to competitors) and more.

I really hate to cite a personal example of mine, but it is relevant. I recently published a TechCrunch column that criticized the use (as I see it) of buzzwords in the online marketing world and went viral. According to BuzzSumo, it got 20,000 shares. It got 350 comments. You know much traffic my personal website got from the link in my author bio in the column? A few hundred visits.

And that didn't matter. I got e-mails with many job offers (thank you, I'm all set) and speaking offers (sure, I'm interested) and more social followers. And those are PR and publicity KPIs, not direct marketing KPIs. There was a study on Inbound.com that purported to show that the ROI of "guest blogging" is bad. But that study was based on bad assumptions because it applied direct marketing KPIs to publicity campaigns -- and the two do not mesh.

So, you want to be in the 10% of contributed articles that get accepted to places like BopDesign or Moz or elsewhere? Here's what I recommend.

3. Stop thinking about "guest post marketing" and start thinking like a publicist. Forget about links and start thinking about the ideas that you want to communicate to the audience that you want to reach.

- Research what publications are read by your target audience- See which of those publications accept contributed articles- Read the guidelines and understand what they want to publish -- every publication is different

4. Once you have a set of publications in mind, think about these issues:

- What can you say that is interesting and original? Case studies and industry analyses are always a good way to brand yourself as a thought leader- Why is your article relevant now? Large news publications focus on the news -- so, have a tie-in your submission to something real-world event or issue that is current in your industry at that exact moment- Quality beats quantity. One "10x" article that is submitted to a major publication such as Moz or TechCrunch or whatever will always beat ten spun copies of a random post that will appear on random, small blogs

Moz: For what it's worth, this community member votes for this post to be moved to the Moz Blog. In my opinion, this discussion of "guest posts" really needs to be heard.

I'm about to dive into the new feature in my company's account, but it seems as though it will go a long way to addressing these issues. I cannot overemphasize the importance of this development -- this is beyond awesome and yet another feather in Moz's cap.

I can only imagine how much work this project took among the R&D and marketing and other teams. So, just from this one person, I wanted to say congratulations and thanks for releasing this new feature. Great work!

I agree these are all examples of publicity campaigns. I think we just use different words to describe the same thing.

Thank you! But since "publicity" came before "content marketing," cannot we all agree just to use the real term and learn about its best practices, which have been developed for 100 years?

The digital marketing world has gone from "off-page SEO" to "inbound marketing" to "content marketing" -- and now we're right back to "publicity." Which is what we should have been doing all along, albeit over digital channels rather than offline ones.

Kelsey, thanks for the great post -- there are a LOT of amazing ideas here.

I hate to risk beating a dead horse, but are these not all examples of great publicity campaigns? As people probably know by now, I fail to see the difference between "publicity" and these types of "content marketing." As I wrote in this guide to publicity campaigns on Moz, the process of brainstorming, executing, and analyzing the results of the two seem to be virtually the same thing.

Personally, I think if our two posts could be combined into a lengthy e-book, then people could learn a lot about creative campaigns that would earn them a lot of publicity (and all of the natural by-products of massive exposure such as links, traffic, and branding)! :)

Thanks for your thoughts! Yes, I know that such a lengthy post can be intimidating. But my personal goal is to put everything on a given topic in one place so that people only need to bookmark one thing for easy reference. :) I hope readers will agree!

Hello everyone, again! After publishing this piece a week or so ago, I came across another great example of publicity and wanted to share:

Flight attendants from the Emirates airline performed during a football (soccer) match in Europe and amazed the crowd with their ball-handling skills. Just think about how many reporters and bloggers wrote about this and how much it has been shared on YouTube, Facebook, and elsewhere! The performance is here.

I may be a more thick-skinned than most people, I dunno, but that Avast ad -- I don't really find it insulting to women or sysadmins.

I can only speak for me, but I'm neither a woman nor a system administrator and I felt bad for the way that women and system administrators were shown in that Facebook post. I'd be curious to hear thoughts from other readers -- anyone?

Angela, thanks so much for the wonderful comment! It means a lot because it's coming specifically from a colleague in the industry. (Though, truth be told, I was a technical SEO person as well as a copywriter and content writer long before I knew anything about PR and publicity!)

Maybe it's just a coincidence, but I've seen some things that Moz as a company and Moz executives specifically have been tweeting, and I think Moz might already have been using some of the tactics I've described here! ;)

Much of the time, it turns out our tactics and strategies aren't new, just updated for the digital era.

Exactly! I don't remember who first came up with this idea (it might have been Jeff Ferguson), but a lot of what we're doing today is (traditional) marketing practices over (new) communications channels that are called the Internet and mobile. The good thing for people reading Moz is that we're really good at using those specific channels -- we just need to understand the overall theory to become even better.

We have a few internal "Publicity Campaigns" (It's going to be difficult to retrain myself to use that instead of PR...) planned for 2016.

I would not worry too much about which specific phrase to use. I myself only correct people when I'm feeling overly pedantic. Most people know what marketers mean when they discuss "PR campaigns."

Linda, thanks you for the nice comment -- I'm glad I was able to help with your studies!

You're already ahead of the game. One thing I have seen over the years is that many -- but not all -- people jumped into the worlds of SEO and online marketing and started to call themselves expert marketers without even knowing the basic philosophies, terminology, and practices that marketers have always used and done. Some of them (intentionally or not) just started creating terms and practices that were either bad imitations of or new buzzwords for existing practices. You won't be one of those people.

To me, it's not just an anal-retentive debate over words. (Is it "content marketing" or "publicity"?) It's not about "if it works, who cares what terms we use?" What I've always argued is that if SEOs and digital marketers take the time to learn all of the marketing philosophies, terms, and practices that are still taught in business school today, then they will become even better at their jobs.

If what one is doing is actually a publicity campaign, then don't use "content marketing" principles -- use the principles of publicity that have been honed for one hundred years.

Yes, the gaining of links can be a goal for content -- but it's a bad goal. As this post and this post on Moz have even shown in the past month, the best and greatest numbers of links come as a natural result and by-product of publicity.

If everyone would stop thinking about links directly and start thinking about building brands, we'd all be much better off.

The first question is not whether you should hire a "PR," "SEO," or "Social Person." The first question is to decide on what you will prioritize in your Promotion Mix. Here's a basic summary.

Direct marketing -- Sending marketing collateral directly to a list of specific people or a targeted audience with the hopes of getting some type of a direct response (a purchase, a download, or something else). Direct marketing includes direct mail, e-mail campaigns, most mobile marketing, and most online "advertising." ***

Personal selling -- Hiring a sales team to persuade people directly to do something.

Advertising -- Building a brand and generating mass awareness through identified placements in mass media outlets. This can lead to more people hearing about and then finding you.

Publicity -- Getting spread organically and subtly over earned and owned media. This can lead to more people hearing about and then finding you.

Sales promotion -- This is not really relevant here (unless you're trying to steal people away from a specific competitor).

*** Yes, most online advertising is actually direct marketing and not advertising.

Each strategy has its pros and cons. But once you decide, you'll need to decide what general channels (offline versus online) and then what specific ones you will use. Then, you'll need to hire an expert in that strategy who knows how to use those channels well.

One thing I hope we have learned after all of the recent posts on PR and publicity is that we need to stop thinking about links directly at all. Think about how to do good PR and get good publicity, and the links will take care of themselves.*

* Yes, a few links can be gained through direct outreach to things like resource lists, and people should use tools to find out about mentions without links. But publicity campaigns are the only "linkbuilding" technique that is continuously and indefinitely viable over the long-term.

Isn't PR equivalent to paying for links - which is a not-recommended practice?

A comment of mine elsewhere in the thread:

If you're going to use that type of logic, then every single link that anyone obtains through any manner is "purchased."

Everything in the world costs either time or money (or both). If I pay a few people $1000 total to put a few links on their websites, then I am directly paying $1000 for links. (Not that I would ever recommend doing this.)

But if I pay a publicist $1000 to try to persuade a few journalists to write articles that happen to contain links to my website, then I am not directly paying -- I am paying for the publicist's time and that is an indirect result because the journalists are the ones who ultimately decide whether to write the articles and whether to include links.

The basic point: If Google would penalize links that are earned through (paid) publicity campaigns, then we would see every single company get hit on organic rankings every single time it gets a lot of media attention. But that is simply not happening.

An earlier Moz link building tutorial recommended "seeding" links through a handful of key bloggers - would that be considered PR?

Obviously Google gives these credence or these start-ups wouldn't being doing well.

You do know that there is a whole world of marketing out there that is not about Google and links, right? Even if Google did not exist, the publicity that these startups had received would still have been immensely valuable. Not everything is about SEO -- in fact, a lot of marketing is not.

I would have thought that Google would discount links like that since they are essentially purchased

If you're going to use that type of logic, then every single link that anyone obtains through any manner is "purchased."

Everything in the world costs either time or money (or both). If I pay a few people $1000 total to put a few links on their websites, then I am directly paying $1000 for links. (Not that I would ever recommend doing this.)

But if I pay a publicist $1000 to try to persuade a few journalists to write articles that happen to contain links to my website, then I am not directly paying -- I am paying for the publicist's time andthat is an indirect result because the journalists are the ones who ultimately decide whether to write the articles and whether to include links.

John, thanks for taking the time to research and write this post! (Ronell, you'll see my initial comment hours ago elsewhere in this thread, LOL.)

I just had one question: Can you clarify the difference between PR / Editorial / Blog links?

In my experience, nearly all of those links are attributable to publicity. There's a branch of PR and publicity called blogger relations, and it's similar but still different from media relations. The goal is to get bloggers to write about you. Often, bloggers will write about you after seeing you mentioned in the mainstream press.

Most of those links will be "editorial" links as well. So, unless I'm misinterpreting things, I'd love to get a clarification when you have time.

Again, great post! I'm actually citing the three Moz Blog posts on publicity this month in a webinar presentation that I'm creating exactly at this moment. :)

Yes, seriously. How are press releases "SEO techniques"? I do hope you're not referring to inserting keyword-spammed anchor-text links into press releases and then posting them on a bunch of PR news release websites.

Press releases are used in PR and publicity campaigns to get coverage. Too many SEOs just took that practice and corrupted it into something else.

Kelsey, Frac.tl, and Moz -- thank you SO MUCH for doing and then publishing this study. As I think most readers know by now, I have always advocated for the use of publicity campaigns as the best way to increase the numbers of natural, authoritative links to websites. (Although the links should come as by-products and not as the main goal -- the most important thing is the publicity and increased brand awareness itself.)

I hope this study will be the final nail in the coffin of artificial "linkbuilding." And I've got a feeling we'll be seeing more and more posts about PR and publicity campaigns on Moz in the future. :)

That's a very good point that few understand. I don't remember the exact number off the top of my head, but I think nine is the average number of exposures to a brand or sales pitch that someone will have before he or she makes a purchase. It's almost never after the first exposure.

Dr. Pete, thanks so much for the quick turnaround on this post following the news!

One question: In SERPs with four ads in the top block and taking the other changes into account, how many organic results tended to be listed in your data sample? Still ten? Or fewer?

Random thought: While organic results will likely not go away anytime soon, people might need to have a contingency plan on the back burner. What will people do if and when organic results disappear either partially or completely? It might never happen, but sometimes I fear what we'll see tomorrow.

Rand, this is a very important post that I think everyone should read twice -- great WBF!

Every single example that you give is an example of how Google is rewarding brands as the search engine becomes better and better at thinking like a human being. As I sometimes put it, it's building a brand that deserves to rank highly.

I go to a conference. I meet people, this friendly person with a hat. Friendly person with a hat goes home and they write an article. Friendly person with a hat's article contains a link to my bookcase website.

Gillian Anderson: "Rand's bookcases are my favorite thing in the apartment." Wow, look. She sent thousands of people searching for Rand's bookcases.

Those are great examples of how publicity builds brands and leads to SEO results.

Personally, I'm not sure "indirect ranking influencers" is the most precise term. If everything in the world can affect Google's SERPs, than everything is an "indirect ranking influencer." If everything is X, then nothing is X. That being said, I don't really have a good alternative term in mind.

Clients, teams, managers, what do they say? They say, "That's not SEO. That's not your job, SEO person."

I've got a long-running debate with our favorite Italian SEO and Moz Associate, so I hope I won't be repeating myself. :)

The marketing industry has agreed-upon terminology for everything from "direct marketing" to "advertisement" to "publicity." We have no agreed-upon definition of "SEO." Whenever people ask me for "SEO advice," I ask them to ask them to be more specific and not to use the word "SEO." Sometimes its rankings, sometimes its analytics, sometimes its creative social media campaigns. It's why Jeff Ferguson of Fang Digital Marketing (he left another comment in this thread) once coined the phrase that SEO is "a collection of best practices."

The problem is that so much affects "SEO" (whatever that might be). So many things go into "SEO campaigns" (whatever those might be). And in the end, if a word means anything and everything, it means nothing.

As a result, I've done some reverse-engineering. Anything that meets the definition of an existing marketing function I have removed from "SEO" (in my mind). Example: Almost all good linkbuilding methods meet the definition of "publicity," so I have removed that from "SEO work."

After one does all of this, all that remains under "SEO" specifically is technical SEO -- sitemaps, mobile design, international optimization, schema markup, and more. And that can fit as a subset under web development. So, in a roundabout way, I guess I'm asking, what is "SEO" in 2016?

Too many companies indeed separate traditional and digital marketing teams, and that action was based on a horrible premise.

Think back to the year 2005. What did traditional marketing teams think about? The 4 Ps. The Promotion Mix. Communications strategies. SWOT analyses. The Five Forces. Building brands.

At that same time, what did digital marketing teams think about? High Google rankings. Getting Facebook and Twitter followers. Building links.

One team was using professional marketing strategies that had been developed over many decades. One team was calling themselves "marketers" but did not even know the first thing about Marketing 101 terms and practices.

Fast forward to today. For reasons that are too numerous and complex to discuss in a comment, almost all of those things that digital marketers thought about in 2005 are gone. (Or at least they should be.) Google's getting better and better at stopping artificial attempts to manipulate rankings. Facebook followings turned into a joke now that brands need to pay to have any reach. The best links are those that websites get without even actively thinking about links.

Marketers will need to become adept at using all available channels. The benefit to most people reading this comment on Moz is that we're all really good at using digital channels specifically -- we just need to understand the context of traditional theory and approaches to make ourselves even better.

This is why I've personally started to say that "SEO" is specifically everything technical -- meta tags, sitemaps, international optimization, mobile optimization, analytics, and more.

Almost everything else fits under PR or into one of the existing parts of the promotion mix -- it's all either advertising, direct marketing, publicity, personal selling, or sales promotions -- and is merely done over digital communications channels.

Other companies could learn from this level of transparency. Your competitors could only do better if they were so open.

Greg, that's a very interesting point. Personally, I've always valued the fact that Moz is very transparent -- it's a great thing.

But beyond branding, does such transparency have any positive, identifiable, and directly attributable effects on sales, revenue, retention, profit, human resources, or anything else? I'm genuinely curious and would love to see if anyone at Moz would have time to respond. Moz could have proof that more companies should be TAGFEE.

I just have to make one minor correction to your restating of my argument:

The issue, in my opinion, is not "PR only" versus "linkbuilding and PR." The issue, to me, is that almost all (good) linkbuilding strategies are just publicity strategies by other names when one looks at the definition of publicity within the marketing promotion mix.

And those practices existed long before the Internet, so I'd hire a good publicist over a linkbuilder any day of the week because they have known for years, if not decades, those best practices in getting the media and the general public to talk about you -- and all of those discussions will generate links naturally.

Congratulations to Sarah, Rand, and everyone on the Moz team! I've been following Moz since 2009 or so -- and it's a pleasure to see the company reach this well-deserved point.

Just a shout-out that one of the best things is not only that Moz will continue to put out more and more great products but also that the company hopes to use the funding to do some good and contribute to the community as well. You don't hear too many companies say that! :)

the definition of marketing mix you've provided (although I would bet Rand is thinking of marketing mix in another way; as in tools and strategies we can use to achieve our goals) its a bit outdated and well, old.

I was quoting a marketing textbook that had been last updated in 2012.

if I have a paid content marketing campaign on social media, it is a legit marketing strategy (for example promoting paid infographic)

The definition of advertising is "any paid form of non-personal presentation and promotion of ideas, goods, or services by an identified sponsor." (Emphasis added.) If you are paying to transmit an infographic or blog post, you are doing advertising. Your advertisement may happen to inform rather than sell directly, but it's still an advertisement.

But today, in a digital, modern context, there are newer concepts and strategies which are on its own highly successful and independent.

Ninety percent of the time, "digital marketers" are simply using new buzzwords for traditional practices when they describe what they do (and they might not even be aware that they are doing so).

SEO as a marketing effort, has no precedent and should not be disqualified because of that... nor because it slips on a more technical side; nor for any reason whatsoever.

I agree with you on this. The ten percent of marketing that is genuinely new today includes things such as technical and on-page SEO, web analytics, and conversion optimization. Another big change is the fact that all of our creatives and sales collateral can be indexed by and found in search engines. Almost everything else, however, has remained the same.

Rand, thanks for the Whiteboard Friday. Almost all of the time, these videos are amazing and insightful -- however, I must take issue this time. :)

The marketing mix is not a distribution of resources to display / paid search / offline / social / content / SEO / e-mail / community / in-app at all.

Here is the definition of "marketing mix." The marketing mix is product, price, place, and promotion (though some have added more to that list in modern times). Then, under promotion, the promotion mix is a distribution of resources among direct marketing, advertising, personal selling, sales promotion, and publicity strategies. (And each of those five strategies have various tactics under them that can be done over online or offline channels.)

Those five elements of the promotion mix are also used at different times and for different reasons. Advertising and publicity are top-of-the-funnel plays. Direct marketing is in the middle. Personal selling is often in the middle or at the bottom. Sales promotions are often used in retention after the funnel. (There are exceptions to all of these rules -- I'm speaking only in generalities.)

Some notes on your example:

"Social media" is not a strategy -- it's a new collection of communications channels over which marcom strategies can be executed

"Content marketing" is not a strategy -- content is produced and transmitted in the execution of marketing strategies (as in the advertisements that are created for an advertising strategy, the webinars that are produced for a personal selling strategy, and the contributed articles that are written for a publicity strategy)

E-mail is direct marketing over a specific communications channel

"Community" is community relations, which falls under PR / external communications

Erica, I just finally had the chance to read this -- great essay! I particularly like the subtext of the whole thing: Companies need to think about more than profits.

Too many people think that businesses are merely cancerous tumors that aim -- and should aim, in fact -- to consume as much resources as possible in pursuit of the selfish goal of maximizing profits by whatever (legal) means necessary. "What? There was a tragedy today? Who cares -- sell more widgets!" That's a very American view of business -- at least since Milton Friedman in the 1970s and the "greed is good" 1980s. It's the idea that only the shareholders matter. When I did my MBA, the first thing my finance professor taught us was this: "Businesses exist only to maximize returns for the shareholders."

What?!

But there's another way to look at business -- and it's a more balanced, European way. Business are not cancers -- they are entities that interact with and contribute to the societies in which they are located. Employees use their salaries to buy stuff and put money back into the community. Corporate taxes fund government construction of local roads, bridges, and schools. And in return, the community buys stuff from the business. And so on. It's the idea that all of the stakeholders -- everyone in the community -- matter.

And when a business rightly sees itself as part of the community, it needs to be sensitive to that community. There's a time to sell widgets and a time to close the shop for the day. And there's a time, as you write, to talk on social media and a time to be quiet. If only more companies understood that fact.

For me, you get coverage by making a journalist's life as easy as possible and giving them something awesome. You get links by giving the journalist something that they can give to their audience on top of that news story.

Well, yeah. But what you describe is simply what publicists have always done. I see no original, additional, added value from what has been described as "content marketing."

"content" is what my Search agency creates and "PR" is what my Search agency uses to promote our content (and get links).

Well, in my opinion, your entire operation is inefficient by having two departments involved in the process.

Just explore what traditional, creative publicists have always done all day long. They create and execute campaigns that comprise both the creation and the publicizing of creatives and marketing collateral. There's no need to reinvent the wheel.

my experience from working at and with PR agencies/publicists is that even when they are doing digital activity their reporting often does not dig into the depths of links acquired, ranking impact and other elements that as SEOs we see as an integral part of the work.

So, here's what you're saying:

Publicists -- great at getting exposure but less good at reporting and analyzing metrics

SEOs / content marketers -- less good at getting exposure but better at reporting and analyzing metrics

It's certainly not a "potato-potahto" argument. First, there is the ethical issue about renaming a practice that already exists in another industry for the benefit of one's own industry (see my comment in this thread here).

But it also comes down to the issue of "as long as it works."

I guarantee all Mozzers this: If you study the theories and best practices in publicity that have been honed for the last one hundred years, you'll be ten or a hundred times more successful than if you read all the latest blog posts on "content marketing."

When I get e-mails with pitches for one thing or another, I can tell in three seconds whether it came from a publicist or a "content marketer." Guess which ones always go in the trash.

I'm not Tom, but I'd venture a guess that a mass audience is suitable for his company. Everyone travels, so it can be useful to target mass outlets that everyone reads. It's not always best to target very niche websites.

Say that you're a publicist who has been doing publicity for years. Then, one day, you see someone selling a new service called "content marketing" that is actually the exact same thing that you had been doing all along. How would you feel?

It's disrespectful at best and disingenuous at worst. But if "content marketers" would admit that they're just selling publicity services, then everyone would hire publicists and "content marketers" would be out of jobs and the Content Marketing Institute would not sell any tickets or magazine subscriptions.

Whether we call that content marketing, a publicity campaign or anything else is maybe a conversation for a whole new post, but I'd rather focus here on the actions that can help move someone's website/business forward rather than how we define them.

I certainly agree that end the end, we're all trying to help each other to become marketers regardless of how we define terms. (And I'm a bit pedantic about facts and word choices as a result of being a reporter in my first career.)

But I think it's a crucial conversation to have. If one produces something that is actually an advertisement, then it's better to look into advertising best practices (which have almost 100 years of experience behind them) rather than read about "content marketing." If one is doing something that is actually a publicity campaign, then it's better to look into best publicity practices (which also have more than 100 years of experience behind them) rather than read about "social media marketing."

By defining our terms at the beginning, we can learn more quickly and market much more effectively later.

I often see great PR campaigns from travel companies which yield zero links.

As a matter of fact, I've seen all too many times that brands who take on "the links will come" mindset typically see far fewer links overall. At the very least, the deliberate links camp is training themselves to better spot optimal link opportunities.

I certainly agree that taking a "links will come" approach sometimes leads to mentions without links. And you know what? I'm actually cool with that. I'm playing a long game rather than trying to get quick boosts in the SERPs.

When my company officially launched a few months ago, we got some good coverage -- but some of it didn't include links. Still, when I looked in Google Webmaster Tools (er, Google Search Console), I saw a huge spike in the number of organic searches (and then clicks) for my company's brand name. And I'm fine with that result.

What links will come will come as you grow a brand and Google recognizes that. I'm increasingly hesitant to do anything that might even come across as a tiny bit artificial.

(Tom, by the way, congratulations on getting promoted to the Moz Blog!)

* Direct marketing is not about the content, it's about the method of contact.

E-mail marketing is direct marketing over the channel of e-mail, so e-mail newsletters are marketing collateral (or content or whatever).

* Personal selling has nothing to do with content.

It certainly has everything to do with content. My company's cofounders give conference presentations and webinars all the time -- and that's personal selling. The slide decks and webinar videos are marketing collateral (or content or whatever).

* Sales promotion is all about the incentive or discount. Nothing to do with how that message is communicated.

It also has to do with how it's communicated. The sales promotion is going to be communicated through a landing page or SMS or coupon or whatever. All of that is marketing collateral (or content or whatever).

Nutshell: "Content" is just that into which a marketing message is placed and which is then transmitted over a communications channel to an audience. It can be an e-mail newsletter, an SMS, a TV advertisement, a coupon, or almost anything else.

That's why "content marketing" is a meaningless word (at least to me). All marketing campaigns transmit "content," so that phrase does not mean anything special or specific.

* Publicity is obviously the closest thing we have to a term for content marketing. But your original post says this is getting attention "via the media."

Exactly -- and here's the thing. Today, we have earned and owned media. So, if a marketing campaign spreads over social media after getting seeded in my company's owned social accounts, then that's also publicity as per the definition because it's still occurring over the media.

As I listed in my Moz post linked earlier in this thread, here's the overall process yesterday and today:

1. Decide on the strategy within the 4 Ps2. Select the weights between the elements of the Promotion Mix3. Choose the channels (online and/or offline) you will use each for any direct selling, advertising, publicity, personal selling, and sales promotions that you will do4. Create the marketing collateral for those campaigns5. Transmit the marketing collateral over the selected channel6. Analyze the results

As marketers this presents a huge opportunity and in my experience I've found there are particular types of ideas that gain more traction in getting shared and proliferated on multiple sites

Well, yeah. Just like there are particular types of advertisements that get millions of people talking about them with their coworkers the next day. Just like there are particular types of creative publicity campaigns that impress millions and get people to talk about them with their family and friends.

I still fail to see how "content marketing" is anything new. All that has changed is that we have an additional set of communications channels over which the creative and marketing collateral can spread -- it's called the Internet.

For me, the 'content' differentiation is important as things like infographics and video in particular are extremely shareable and it is easy for one website to see the content on another publication and take it for themselves

So, the only difference is the type of marketing collateral and channel? Then, the difference you're describing is a change of tactics -- and the overall strategy remains the same. The strategy is one or more of the following (as I described in my Moz post on integrating traditional and digital marketing): direct marketing, advertising, personal selling, sales promotion, and publicity.

At a prior agency at which I worked, we had a client get massive publicity after we compiled some internal data of theirs into an infographic that got covered in the major media. That was a publicity campaign, not "content marketing."

We never call anything that’s good “content.” Nobody walks out of a movie they loved and says, “Wow! What great content!” Nobody listens to “content” on their way to work in the morning. Do you think anybody ever called Ernest Hemingway a “content creator”? If they did, I bet he would punch ‘em in the nose.

If Moz publishes a post of mine, I take pride on the fact that it was (hopefully!) a great contributed article (or by-lined article, if you want to use the traditional PR term). It is not "content." I've got an idea for a creative campaign for my company involving an original, funny photoshoot. If I seed it on social media and it spreads organically, then that is a great publicity campaign (as per the definition of the term). It is not "content marketing" or "social media marketing." If I pay to have the campaign spread on social media, then it is an advertising campaign (as per the definition of the term).

Whether it's in marketing or in life, every generation thinks that it is doing something completely original and awesome and new. (Or it's a company that is trying to pretend like it's doing or advocating for something new in order to sell something.)

And it's almost never the case. There's nothing new under the digital sun. Whenever people use new buzzwords such as "inbound marketing" or "content marketing" or "social media marketing" or "outreach" or whatever, they are almost always referring to one of the five practices within the marketing promotion mix that have been done for generations as per the definitions of those terms.

Ronell, thanks for the comment -- but I think we're approaching the issue in two different ways. If you recall my lengthy Moz post on integrating traditional and digital marketing, you'll remember that I defined the five marketing strategies that have always existed under the Promotion part of the 4 Ps.

If you read those definitions, you will see that anything and everything that is shown as an example of "content marketing" is doing one of those five strategies by another name. And since those five elements came decades before the phrase "content marketing" ever existed, the only logical course of action is to say the "content marketing" is just a new word for something that already existed.

With all due respect, this is an example of a great publicity campaign and not "content marketing." This was the process you followed:

1. Come up with a creative idea2. Create a media list3. Create the creatives and marketing collateral4. Pitch your target outlets to write about it

That's what publicists did long before the Internet ever existed, and it's why "content marketing" does not really exist as a new thing unto itself. It's the same old thing -- just repackaged into a new buzzword.

As this great example shows, links are just by-products of good publicity campaigns. Marketers need to stop thinking about "getting links" and start thinking about how to get publicity -- in other words, how to get reporters, writers, bloggers, and people in general to talk about them online. The "earned" links will come by themselves as natural results.

I had no idea I was spending way too much time here -- but that is what happens when you have an awesome community of great posts, great questions in the Q&A forum, and great comments to discuss! Just all around great. :)

Ronell, thanks so much for the nice words! But I just wanted to clarify something.

"Great SEO" is not all just "PR." Everything that is a technical or on-page issue -- sitemaps, international SEO, mobile usability, server log analysis, and countless other things -- is certainly SEO.

My argument has always just been that everything that we have called "off-page SEO" is really just good marketing by other names -- doing, for example, advertising and publicity campaigns that build brands, increase engagement, and earn links. All of those things that build brands that deserve to rank highly.

My simple formulation: Build, promote, and publicize a site that will delight its target audience. Everything else will fall into place as Google increasingly becomes an algorithm that thinks like a human being.

Liam, thanks for the compliment -- but I'm certainly not the "PR guru of the Moz community." I'd give that honor to Lexi Mills. She has spoken at Mozcon and elsewhere several times on the topic and is giving this Mozinar soon.

The only element of your comment I'd disagree with is about thinking in terms of traditional marketing and it yielding better results than content marketing, social media marketing

My apologies for not being precise. My argument is not about traditional marketing vs. content marketing or social media marketing or whatever. My argument is that "content marketing" and "social media marketing" do not exist as functions unto themselves.

Take any well-known example of "content marketing." Oreo's Super Bowl tweet was a publicity stunt. Dollar Shave Club's first commercial was an advertisement. Red Bull's space jump was publicity. A contributed article to a publication is publicity (or, in certain rare cases, an advertisement). A webinar is personal selling.

Again, all marketing is doing elements of the promotion mix: some desired mix of direct marketing, advertising, publicity, personal selling, or sales promotion.

Social media is a collection of communications channels over which marketing campaigns are executed. Oreo's Super Bowl tweet was a publicity stunt that was transmitted over Twitter. Dollar Shave Club's advertisement was a YouTube video that was transmitted over Facebook. If I export a list of people who tweet about widgets and tweet to them, that is doing direct marketing over Twitter. And so on.

If we really want to do our best as marketers, then we need to rethink everything that we think we know and go back to learning what marketing has done all along.

One other thing, Moz -- can I quibble with the headline? This is not a "PR tactic" -- this is "direct marketing." Publicity and direct marketing are two different things within the promotion mix. A more accurate headline would be "Here’s How We Found Success By Using Direct Marketing For Agency Outreach."

When I saw this statement, I thought you were either trolling or completely unaware of traditional marketing. But your YouMoz post proved the exact opposite. Well done!

The truth is that there have always been only five marketing strategies: direct marketing, advertising, personal selling, sales promotion, and publicity. Those together comprise the promotion mix under the 4 Ps.

Direct marketing is using "direct connections with carefully targeted individual consumers to both obtain an immediate response and cultivate lasting customer relationships." The only difference is the channel. Direct marketing can be done over the postal mail (as in your example), social media (Twitter lists), e-mail (subscriber lists), and more. Channels change, but the strategy never does.

(Another example is publicity, which is "gaining public visibility or awareness for a product, service, or your company via the media." There are roughly twelve different publicity tactics, and a few if them are tie-ins with news events, events, or holidays. Publicists have always done this, but certain marketers today have rebranded it as "newsjacking" as if it were something completely new and different.)

My point? Too many people proclaim that "marketing has changed" in one way or another, when in fact little has changed. Most of those marketers are selling something to other marketers. (To help the community to learn more about traditional marketing, I created an extensive, step-by-step marketing flowchart process here on Moz.)

As Liam has shown the Moz community, thinking in terms of traditional marketing strategy and will always yield the best results over thinking of buzzwords such as "content marketing" or "social media marketing" or "newsjacking" or whatever the flavor of the month is now. Best practices exist for a reason.

Russ, this is a great analysis and it confirms what my gut has been telling me for so long.

The chief problem with Google's Keyword Planner is that is focuses on broad, short-tail keywords because Google intends the tool to be used in PPC and not SEO campaigns. Like, you can get keyword volumes -- accurate or not -- for, say, "marketing software" or "ppc software" or "marketing automation software."

But in this and many other examples, it's very difficult to get any useful keyword volume data for a ton of long-tail queries. And I have yet to see a good alternative. SimilarWeb might work, I have yet to try it.

SEO software companies, take heed: If you could somehow provide search volume data for hundreds or thousands of long-tail keywords in any given niche, I'm sure that the demand would be HUGE.

Since we're talking about gaining Twitter followers, can I throw out a pet peeve and a recommendation to Mozzers?

Whenever I see someone follow me, and they have almost exactly the same, large number of followers and the same, large number of people they follow, I groan. If I see that someone's follower and following numbers are both, say, around 10,000 -- that tells me three things:

1. They don't really have an interest in who they follow -- no one can possibly keep track of 10,000 people in a Twitter feed.

2. They are merely following people and then unfollowing those who don't follow back after a certain period of time -- that's the only explanation when the following and follower counts are both large and similar.

3. They are not worth my time because they don't really care about who I am and what I have to say.

I'm sure no Mozzers would do something like this, but I do see it all the time. Please, marketing world, be smarter than that when trying to gain followers! :)

Yes, buying bulk robot followers for cheap is stupid. But that's not what Larry is advocating (in my opinion). Businesses can pay to get in front of a real, targeted audience that may choose to follow them. It's actually not that different from traditional advertising.

Say I see an ad for a new soda on TV. If it piques my interest, I might go out and buy a bottle to try. If I like it, I might continue to buy and thereby become a "follower" of that brand. In the same way, a promoted account might pique my interest and I might choose to try and follow the social account of that person or business.

Same as it ever was.

The dirty little secret in social media is that "brand engagement" for free was always going to be BS. No one wants to "have a conversation" with the soda that they drink. What percentage of posts on Facebook or Twitter are about people talking about brands?

And why would any for-profit company give other for-profit companies a way to make money for free?

Facebook essentially pulled a massive bait-and-switch -- the company got companies on board by talking about "free brand engagement with fans" but then cut off the fan reach and made companies pay to get in front of audiences.

Whether it's by companies paying to get followers or paying to get in front of people, social networks are becoming just another advertising channel that companies can choose to include in their marketing promotion mixes.

Rand, this is a great topic! Earlier this year, I published a Moz essay on the related issue how to approach owned and earned media and just wanted to summarize my personal thoughts here for those who might be interested.

1. Publishing somewhere else is great for your short-term marketing goals that relate to PR, publicity, and brand awareness.

Say that my company sells widgets and no one in the widget industry knows about us. Well, I can publish a by-lined article or perhaps even get news coverage on websites and publications that are read by people who sell widgets.

Such a tactic increases brand awareness immediately -- and can also be used in conjunction with advertising and other similar approaches -- because those websites will spread the content throughout and across their existing channels and audiences. This is especially useful when your own followings and subscribers are low in number.

In short, publish stuff on third-party platforms and other websites for your "outbound marketing" goals because LinkedIn, Medium, can give a huge boost to your brand awareness because they already have the audiences and the huge reach.

2. Publishing on your own domain is great for your long-term marketing goals that relate to SEO, social media, and inbound marketing in general.

Is your article, guide, or anything else targeting a specific search query? Why would you give that material to someone else? Put it on your domain, and you'll see long-term benefits over time as (hopefully) your rankings increase over the long term as you build a quality brand.

Plus, the more that you publish on your website, the more that you'll attract visitors -- and some percentage of those visitors will become leads or customers, follow you on social media, subscribe to e-mail newsletters, and so on. It's a big funnel.

In short, publish on your own domain in the context of your "inbound marketing" goals.

Please if your CEO, client is talking about a likes, you'll have to be professional and have to learn them that they are wrong ... but you look like you are on the same ship and you cannot help them.

I agree that "likes" are somewhat vanity metrics. But an old client of mine, the VP of Marketing at a mobile ad network, had a point. The CEO was obsessed with "likes" for this reason: If he has 50% more "likes" than his competitor, then that would make the company seem more valuable if he would ever decide to sell. Tens of thousands of "likes" might add tens of thousands of dollars or more to the sale price.

Yes, it's BS. But still, that's the real world, and we have to live and work in it.

This statement is saying that you knowledge about SEO is very poor or let's say only on a surface, but today I don't have much time to write.

No. For example, I was doing "SEO" years before I knew anything about PR. I started my marketing career in SEO.

It's that no one takes the time to define their terms, so people call certain activities "SEO" that are not "SEO."

Take the definition of "publicity" (included in my article) -- "gaining public visibility or awareness for a product, service, or your company via the media." If I publish an article on behalf of my company in a technical publication for system administrators that also refers to a resource on our website (and the link is one of the least-important reasons for the article), then by definition that is doing "publicity." It's not "SEO" or "linkbuilding."

That's why 99% of good "linkbuilding" is just doing publicity by other names. But no one wants to admit that because if they did, then clients would start to realize that they should hire publicists rather than "linkbuilders."

Why to not for no extra effort extend it with our own blog blog, viral content such a photos or tagging event via social, atc.

That's my point -- including photos and social media is done within publicity campaigns. That's why I say people need to think about the entire workflow process that I described.

If people decided that publicity is the best promotion tool to use, then execute a publicity campaign with whatever "content" and communications channels will be best to use.

The answer to a marketing question is not "content" or "social media" or whatever. It's "direct marketing" or "sales promotion" or "personal selling" or "advertising" or "publicity" -- whatever promotion mix will be best. Once the promotional mix is decided, then it is executed be creating creatives and marketing collateral and then transmitting it over channels.

Online strategy should solve people (and their intent, problems, etc.) all across the online funnel (awareness, exploration, consideration, conversions, relationship, retention) while "traditional mix", can hardly do first three step (awareness thru media coverage, cannot reach whole target group for most of the brands).

Apple is the most valuable company in the world, and they built themselves with these two things: great UX and great print and TV advertisements. Traditional advertising can certainly be the best way to go (depending on the product and industry).

Just publicity is expensive and unefficient way to go.

People don't understand publicity. Everyone thinks its going out and hiring an expensive PR firm or agency. Nope. It can be very cheap -- you just have to be creative. Here's a cheap example I often give:

Say you're a small coffee house in Boston on a cold winter day. Get all of your baristas in winter jackets with your logo, and pass out free coffee at bus and subway stops in the morning. Put your Twitter handle and/or hashtag on the cups. Encourage people to take photos with the baristas and post them on social media with the hashtag. Tip off the local media and city bloggers what you'll be doing before you'll do it.

Beacuse if they have for exampe great blog, with nice content they can build up an relations ship or offer a added value for visitors and they can probably share the great content with another people.

To go with my Pizza Hut Israel example. What could the Pizza Hut branch down the street in Tel Aviv possibly publish on a blog that would be original and interest me? To go with Bob Hoffman's example, would you subscribe to and actively read the blogs of any of the companies that produce the items that are in your refridgerator? Most people would not. I barely have time to read all the feeds in my Feedly that I do follow.

Yes, sometimes "content" -- still, it's a stupid word -- is the answer. But sometimes it's not. Most of the people who think "content" is the answer to everything probably sell content production or content promotion services.

SEO is solving what visitors are doing on your website and how they perform with your real goals like signups, content consuption, find informations they need, relationship with customer, perform well vs. competition, onsite issues, ux, ui, lower bounce rate, higher conversion rate, etc. Tell me now how you gonna do this with just "traditional mix".

"SEO" stands for "search engine optimization." That means optimizing your website to helps search engines to crawl, parse, index, and rank it. (That's on-page and technical issues.) Everything else is not "SEO," by definition. So much now goes into rankings that I even remove that part from the definition and classify it under "brand building" and more.

If "SEO" means everything, then it means nothing.

Likes?! Who is talking about likes in 2015?!

My boss. My CEO. Every client I ever had in the past. Sure, we talk amongst ourselves about how "likes" are just vanity metrics now and really don't matter. But in the real world, people value those numbers. My boss wants our "likes" to exceed those of the competition because it looks better to various external parties.

Of course they did it with "traditional mix", but they will perform way better when they do proper social media communication

How can we for instance appear in tv shows or appear on a press releases . What actions do i need to take.

Well, that's a very big question! TV talk shows, just like the major media outlets, get hundreds or thousands of press requests a day. It's very hard to break through. TV show producers instead often scan the headlines to find interesting guests. So, if you can get major media coverage, they may actually contact you. The way around that is to hire a publicist who personally knows a producer at a TV talk show -- but they are expensive.

In terms of how to get media coverage, I'd suggest taking a look at my Moz post on PR 101 for digital marketers. It walks through the overall ideas and shows the step-by-step process of a publicity campaign. Good luck!

However, I must perhaps disagree with your comments on Millennials versus Baby Boomers. Marketers have a tendency to become enamored of whatever is new -- it's a cult of worship of the young. If Generation Y, for example, is moving away from Facebook and towards Instagram, then everyone starts talking about how companies need Instagram strategies.

But that's wrong.

For various economic and societal reasons in the United States (I don't know about elsewhere), Millennials are broke and Baby Boomers have all the money. Yet luxury car companies (in one example I remember somewhere) are marketing towards Generation Y -- even though Millennials overall have no money to buy cars and have less of an interest in car ownership in general.

It doesn't make sense for that car company to abandon Baby Boomers because they have money and they are not going anywhere. From having the money to afford great health care to technical advances that will likely extend life-spans in the coming decades, the Baby Boomers will likely dominate the economy scene. And marketers cannot ignore that.

Have you seen a good graph/tool/guide for plugging in what industry your company is in, what stage in their lifecyle they're in, and what channels the company should start with?

This is such a huge question that it deserves its own post! But I can offer a few thoughts. Since a lot of Mozzers work for SaaS companies, I'll use that example.

At the beginning stage, companies need users and revenue (sometimes to get a funding round and sometimes to become profitable after a funding round). So, they would likely need a combination of advertising, publicity, and growth hacking. When competitors arise at later stages, they might need sales promotions, direct marketing, and retention efforts.

However, I can only say that there's no easy answer. It depends on the product, the industry, and a lot more. Every situation is different -- it's why I always recommend that people test every option to see what works for them.

Is there something that a small business who just starting out can do these things without having a budget constraint?

First of all, whenever someone asks, "How can I do X for free or cheap?" I always respond with this question: "Do you believe in your product?" If you believe in your product, then you will take the risk and invest some of your money or get a loan. If you're too scared to invest your own money, then that's a subconscious sign that you don't really have faith in what you're doing.

Second, publicity campaigns are often cheap and require nothing but creativity. Here's one example. Say you're a small coffee house in Boston on a cold winter day. Get all of your baristas in winter jackets with your logo, and pass out free coffee at bus and subway stops in the morning. Put your Twitter handle and/or hashtag on the cups. Encourage people to take photos with the baristas and post them on social media with the hashtag. Tip off the local media and city bloggers what you'll be doing before you'll do it.